Egoyan's Chloe a reinvention of sexy French drama
Last Updated: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 | 10:38 AM ET
CBC News
Actress Julianne Moore listens to director Atom Egoyan during the press conference for the new film Chloe on Monday during the Toronto International Film Festival. (Malcolm Taylor/Getty Images) Though it's based on a French movie, the filmmakers behind Chloe describe the erotic psychological drama as a reinvention of the story rather than a remake.
"I loved the basic principle of the story, the sort of underlying idea of what happens when suspicion takes over a long-term relationship," veteran producer Ivan Reitman said of the 2005 original Nathalie, the premiere of which he saw at the Toronto International Film Festival.
With Nathalie not widely released in North America, "I thought there was an opportunity to see how far it could go," Reitman told a press conference Monday afternoon, a day after Chloe's premiere at this year's edition of TIFF.
As Reitman worked on the project with screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson and with celebrated Toronto director Atom Egoyan over the years, they made a host of changes to the original, about a woman who hires a prostitute to engage her philandering husband and report back about their encounters.
For instance, Egoyan wanted the prostitute (portrayed by Amanda Seyfried as the titular Chloe) to be significantly younger than the woman (actress Julianne Moore), and for the latter to be uncertain about whether her husband (played by Liam Neeson) is cheating in the first place.
"They are both soothing each other for reasons they don't understand, but also tormenting each other and that was very exciting for me in terms of the casting, the way we developed the screenplay and the rich possibilities that this had as a psychological drama," Egoyan said.
Switching settings
The film's setting also changed: originally from San Francisco, Cressida Wilson had set the film in her hometown, but the final product is unabashedly set in Egoyan's: Toronto.
"I realized that I was a tourist in [San Francisco]. There is a very specific social milieu that this film was examining, and there is a class structure that it's also looking at. I understand that in this city [Toronto] very well," Egoyan said.
He sought to convince Reitman that Toronto "could be as alluring and as sexy and romantic as San Francisco," and the movie mogul agreed, after Egoyan took him on a tour of neighbourhoods that don't typically turn up on film.
"[Toronto's] always standing in, you know, for New York or for Chicago or God knows what," Reitman said of his one-time hometown.
"I was saying, 'You know, we never see these streets because they're always hidden because they don't look enough like those stand-in cities. We really should do it here. It's really quite a romantic city and a beautiful city. It's a city that's been architecturally reborn, particularly in the past 10 years."
Canadian audiences will get to see the film in theatres in December, while Egoyan expressed confidence that U.S. deal is forthcoming.
The Oscar-nominated filmmaker added that he found Chloe — the first feature which he directs but didn't write — "incredibly liberating."
Directing Cressida Wilson's linear screenplay "allowed me to focus on bringing things out from the script, knowing what the scene was about specifically," Egoyan said.
"Sometimes, in an original script, you're not quite sure what the scene is about until it's pieced into the film — and that's not necessarily in order, as you probably know from the work I do," he said. "I enjoyed it. It was great."
